


Synchronicity

by ssrhpurgatory



Series: Synchronicity Fractals [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Airports, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bisexual Female Character, Bisexual Male Character, F/M, Flirting, Holidays, Mistletoe, One Night Stands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:55:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28371990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Thanks to a snow storm, Alexander Hilbert is stuck in an airport on the way to Volgograd to spend Christmas with his family, and finds himself eying the rather interesting woman in front of him in line. Fortunately for him, she's eying him back.(Like so many things I write, a prompt that got out of hand.)
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert/Original Female Character
Series: Synchronicity Fractals [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2126490
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Synchronicity

Alexander stared despondently at the departures board. Well, he certainly would not be making it home in time for Christmas. Even if the storm had cleared out enough by tomorrow morning for him to get on a flight to where he would catch his transfer to Moscow and then on to Volgograd, he had been cutting it close anyway.

Ah, well. It would not be the first year he had not made it back to Volgograd in time for Christmas Day. His parents would forgive him. His nieces and nephews… well, they would either be excited to get his presents a bit late, or they would be so overwhelmed by all of the festivities that they would not care one way or another about them.

One of attendants at the gate his flight _should_ have been leaving from shortly made an announcement; they were issuing vouchers for the hotel that was attached to the airport, and they were unloading everyone’s suitcases and sending them to baggage claim. Alexander queued up with everyone else, stepping into the line behind a short, fat Black woman with a close-shaved head.

The line was long and progress slow as the flight attendants worked on rescheduling everyone. For lack of anything better to do, Alexander found himself studying the woman in front of him. She was certainly eye-catching: dressed in a jewel-toned tunic with a subtle, shifting sort of pattern to it, wearing a necklace of chunky, colorful glass beads and earrings to match, her carry-on luggage a ruby-red hard-shell case, the glimpses he caught of her profile every now and again serene and unbothered.

As they waited, he began making up a story in his head about her. She would be… he considered the hints of grey in that close-shaved hair, the bright colors. A schoolteacher, perhaps, of very young children. She had creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth that seemed very cheerful, and he could just imagine her in front of a classroom, teaching children addition and multiplication.

He kept himself very busy for the next twenty minutes as he indulged in this fantasy, giving her a small child of her own—no, three, she looked the sort who would want more than one child—and a loving… well, he would not speculate on the gender of her spouse, but between the close-shorn hair and a certain stance to her shoulders, he would be very surprised if her partner was not a woman.

She adjusted the strap of her shoulder bag, shifting it to a more comfortable postion, and he noticed a little rainbow flag pin hanging off the corner of the front flap of it. Yes, definitely a woman, he thought.

“You want to tell me why you keep ogling me, then?” a low, raspy voice asked him.

Alexander’s eyes snapped open wide in surprise, and he looked up from the bag to find the woman looking over her shoulder directly at him, one eyebrow raised dangerously. “Ah. I… ah.”

She laughed and turned the rest of the way towards him, a smile creasing her cheeks. “I mean, I can understand the urge to people-watch, but I feel like you’ve been trying to bore a hole in me with your eyes ever since you got in line.”

Alexander found himself responding with an awkward smile of his own, almost compelled to it by the brightness and cheer of hers. She had a broad face and broad features to match them, with wide brown eyes that caught the light and sparkled as if she was keeping a secret that was bursting to escape. And that smile… Alexander cleared his throat and tried to regain some modicum of control over himself. “My apologies. My phone died while we were waiting on updates, and I was planning to charge it once I was in hotel room and could easily dump out bag to find cord.” He gestured at his only carry-on, a well-battered backpack that he had slung over one shoulder. “And…” he felt bold all of a sudden. “You simply… looked interesting.”

This got another laugh from the woman. “Well, if you thought I looked interesting, you could have actually _talked_ to me, you know.”

He acknowledged this hit with a sideways duck of his head, not quite a nod. “Did not want to disturb you, if you did not wish to be. I, ah… I understand that women often find themselves recipients of unwanted male attention in public spaces.”

She acknowledged the point with a little nod of her own and a rueful glance down at her chest, which even Alexander had to admit was quite impressive now that it was actually in view. Fat did not always make for buxom, but this woman had… how had Isabel put it, when discussing this sort of figure? Ah, yes. Vast tracts of land.

“Okay,” she said, with what he considered an unwarrantedly sarcastic twang to her voice, “but if you _really_ didn’t want to subject me to unwanted male attention—” one of her eyebrows quirked upward dangerously at those words, and Alexander found his gaze riveted on her face, like a prey animal mesmerized by a snake that was about to strike “—then you wouldn’t have been staring at me like that.”

“There is nothing I can say that will make me look good here,” he admitted, holding his hands up in surrender. “It has been long day. You were unfortunate victim of my exhaustion. Suspect I would have stared at anyone ahead of me in line like that.”

The expression on the woman’s face softened a bit. “Well, I’ll forgive you this once, I suppose.” She bit her lower lip, an unfortunate gesture. It drew his eyes to how plump it was, to how her bold red lipstick emphasized those full lips of hers. “I’m Rosemary,” she said, holding her hand out to him.

Alexander shoved down the sudden and completely unexpected spike of desire that had gone through him at the sight of her nibbling her lip, and shook the offered hand firmly. “Alexander.” And then, because he was feeling bold again, something he also blamed on his current levels of exhaustion, he added, “My friends call me Sasha.”

That dangerous eyebrow of hers went off again. “And am I a friend?”

“Let me buy you a drink when we are done here, and perhaps we could find out.” Was he flirting with this woman? Not intentionally, he supposed, but something about her tone of voice invited banter.

Her mouth pursed and thinned in a way that made it clear she was suppressing a smile. “To soften me up?”

“To apologize.” When she looked perplexed, he added, “For staring.”

“All right.” She gave him a brief once-over… and then a not-so-brief one. Forget the matter of whether or not _he_ had been flirting; was _she_?

Regardless of whether or not that look had been flirtatious, she was nibbling her lower lip again, an action he apparently found incredibly distracting. Fortunately, the line was moving a bit now, and she turned her back to him as she moved to close the gap between herself and the person in front of her.

His reprieve didn’t last long. She turned back and waited for him, leaning against the extended handle of her carry-on, her expression keen as she examined his face. “So, what do you do when you’re not stuck in an airport?” she asked.

“Biochem research,” he said, keeping the details purposefully vague. She might be attractive, but she was still a stranger, and he did not want to risk accidentally exposing too much of himself to someone he had never met before.

To his surprise, her eyes lit up. “You do anything in Micro? I work mainly with bacteria, myself.”

“Ah. Yes.” He blinked at her, more than a little taken aback by the fact that she was not the schoolteacher his mind had decided she must be. “Retroviruses, mostly.”

“I heard they were doing some neat things with retrovirus vaccines lately. Anything you’ve worked on?”

Despite his surprise that she might have the knowledge base to understand what he did in his day job, Alexander tried to keep his response vague, though it wasn’t all the result of him wanting to keep some part of himself private. After all, his employers would not take kindly to him being loose-lipped about the projects they gave him. “Not directly, though I know some of the work I do has been of benefit there.”

The woman—Rosemary, her name was Rosemary, he could remember that—gave him a wry little smile. “Ah, the sound of a man working under strict NDAs. I know the feeling.” She tilted her head to one side and considered him thoughtfully. “Got any hobbies?”

Alexander wracked his brain for an answer. _Did_ he have hobbies? He mostly worked and slept and worked more. Well, except for something he didn’t usually admit to in polite company.

But he’d probably never see this woman again, so why not admit to it? “I read trashy thriller novels when I want to turn my brain off.”

She let out a delighted laugh. “I’ve got a bad habit of trashy romance novels myself, so who am I to judge?”

“Do you ever come across bad science in those? I find it infuriating.”

“Which is why you have to turn your brain off to read them, I imagine. And more often than you’d think.” She made a face. “For some reason the historicals _really_ get on my nerves. Sanitation, people!”

Alexander let out a startled bark of a laugh himself. “So often I wonder how these people do not die of some obscure blood-borne disease. They do not often practice, ah, _sanitary_ field medicine.”

“Digging a bullet out in a gas station bathroom and so on?”

Alexander nodded. “And worse.”

“I can imagine.”

The line was moving again, and a few minutes later, Rosemary was called up to the counter. Alexander kept watching her as she had what seemed to be a relatively cheerful conversation with the desk agent, one that had the woman smiling in short order. Really quite a feat given that the desk agent had looked to be in a rather foul mood when Rosemary had approached.

The other agent called Alexander over in a tone of voice that made it apparent this was not the first time the man had tried to get Alexander’s attention.

“Apologies. It has been… very long day.”

The man made a noncommittal noise and took the ticket Alexander offered him. “Looks like I can get you on a flight tomorrow at noon that will take you to Los Angeles, and there’s a flight leaving for Moscow late in the evening, and they will re-book you for your new connecting flight to Volgograd once you get there.”

“That will do just fine, thank you.” It would get him in later than expected—his nieces and nephews would most likely get their presents two days late, not one—but he would get there, and he would still have a week to spend with family.

Rosemary had finished her business and disappeared from his line of sight while the desk agent issued Alexander his new tickets and a room voucher for the airport hotel, and he found himself wondering if she had changed her mind about that drink. But when he turned to look for her, there she was, waiting off to one side for him, the jewel-rich colors of her clothing almost glowing in the fluorescent lighting of the airport.

“Apparently there’s a bar in the hotel lobby that’s open for business,” she said when he joined her. “Assuming you still want that drink? I can pay for my own, though.”

He shook his head. “Like I said. I owe you.”

A little smile twitched at the corners of her mouth for a moment. “Oh, all right, if you insist. I’ll buy the second round, then.”

“If you insist,” he echoed.

Rosemary studied her new companion as they waited at the baggage claim for his suitcase. Alexander had the look of a quiet academic, with round glasses and ruffled dark hair that curled just enough that it must make most mens hair styles a struggle, a haze of stubble on his jaw as testament to how long his day had been. His clothing was boring—neatly ironed slacks on his bottom half, sweater vest and collared shirt above, all in shades of blue and grey—but the cuffs of his shirt were rolled almost to his elbows and the top button was undone, exposing the divot between his collarbones.

And he had quite a hefty suitcase to claim, at least compared to her carry-on. She wondered if he was simply going on a long vacation, or if it was packed to the gills with presents for whoever he was going to see.

“Both,” he said when she asked him, as they meandered their way towards the hotel and its bar. “I have four older siblings, and all of them have children who expect Uncle Sasha to bring them interesting presents from America.”

Rosemary wondered what it would be like, to be part of a big family like that. “And you? No kids yourself, I take it?”

He shook his head, a little awkward. “Ah… no. I have had… other priorities.”

Well, that she understood. “At least all those niblings must keep your parents off your back about settling down and giving them more grandchildren to spoil.”

“If only.” He rolled his eyes. “It is always, ’Sasha, what happened to that nice boy you were seeing?’ ‘Sasha, we just want to see you happy.’ ‘Sasha, your sister has a friend I think you should meet.’” He sighed. “I do not think I would _mind_ settling down if I found the right person, but work will always come first, and that makes everything involved in doing that… difficult.”

And he had just confirmed at least one of her suspicions, that he had been staring at that little rainbow flag pin on her bag for a reason. Though she wouldn’t outright declare him gay unless he said something to that effect; he’d been eyeing her in a way that was definitely appreciative, and she thought he might have been flirting with her, too. “I’m an only child, but my mom didn’t particularly want kids herself, so now that dad’s dead all the pressure’s off, thank god.”

“Is she who you are going to see?”

Rosemary nodded. “She moved to rural California after dad died and right in with an old college friend of hers, and absolutely refuses to relocate somewhere more convenient. And my job…” she sighed. “Well, at least I make enough to fly out and see her every other month or so.”

“I can only make it to Russia once a year, but I save up my leave and try to make a real vacation of it,” Alexander said.

“Sounds… well, I can’t imagine it’s _lovely_ , this time of year, but it must be nice to see family.”

He laughed at that. “Yes. It is… well. The cross-country skiing is good, and there is always ice-skating.”

Rosemary made a face. “Last time I tried to ice skate I fell on my ass five times and cracked my tailbone. Which, as you can imagine given the amount of natural padding, was _quite_ the feat.”

Alexander glanced over at her in a way that made her certain he was eying her backside. Yes, definitely some interest there.

“I bet I could keep you upright,” was all he said rather than the racy comment on the size of her ass that she’d expected. “You just need a good teacher.”

“Well, I’ll keep that in mind the next time I get the urge to go skating,” she teased. “Find a Russian to teach me.”

“Find _me_ to teach you,” he demanded. “You cannot go around accosting random Russians and ordering them to teach you to skate.”

“Oh, very well.” They’d arrived at the bar. Rosemary glanced down at Alexander’s suitcase. “Did you want to go check in first?”

He sighed. “No, I suspect there will be another line, and I have had enough of standing in queues for the moment. Let us have that first round of drinks and see how things are then.”

“Sounds good.”

When they said they were there for drinks, the hostess stuck them in a little corner table with a round booth that curved around behind it, just large enough for two or three people. The bar wasn’t exactly crowded, but Rosemary suspected it was seeing more business than it usually would two days before Christmas.

Alexander shoved his suitcase under the table. “What would you like?”

“The cheapest whiskey they’ve got on the menu,” Rosemary said decisively.

He raised his eyebrows somewhat dubiously, but did not comment further. “Very well. Be right back.”

A few minutes later he returned and set a glass with a finger or so of brown liquid in the bottom in front of her. “That smells like it could sterilize lab equipment,” he said, nodding at it as he settled into the booth at her side. He had something clear—probably vodka, if stereotypes about Russians held true—and he downed his first swallow of it with a relieved look on his face.

“Probably could.” Rosemary took a small sip of her cheap whiskey, savoring the burn of it. “But I enjoy it, and that’s all that _really_ matters.” She held her glass up in a toast.“To being stuck in an airport during a snow storm. And to new friends.”

“Budem zdorovy,” Alexander said, sounding drily amused, clinking his glass against hers before downing another swift swallow.

“Really, though, thank you for keeping me company. I’d probably be on Twitter all evening without it, and that’s a recipe for being even more stressed than I already am.”

“I am happy to keep you from social media.” He tilted his head to one side to look at her. “Thank you for forgiving me for staring at you.”

“I know you said you were just staring because you were tired—“

“And because you are very brightly colored,” he interrupted to add.

“—but that makes me wonder what sort of opinion you’d formed of me before we started talking.”

He blushed. “What makes you think I had formed an opinion of you?”

“Well, for one, you looked like I’d given you the shock of your life when I asked if you worked in micro.”

“I, ah… thoughtyouwereateacher,” he mumbled into his glass.

Rosemary tried not to laugh. “Well, I do teach sometimes, when the local university needs someone to pick up a session of microbiology, but I’m going to assume you mean a little bit younger than college.”

“I was thinking kindergarten,” he admitted.

She glanced down at herself. “Do I look like a kindergarten teacher?”

“Well…”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “What?”

“I think it is just the bright colors,” he said with an awkward little shrug. “They are very… cheerful.”

“I suppose that’s true.” Rosemary fingered one of the uneven glass beads on her necklace. “Anything else you’d decided about me?”

“You would not happen to have a wife and three children, would you?”

That made her laugh. “God no. I’m single and happy with it, thank you very much.” She nibbled her lower lip, considering. “Guess I wouldn’t mind the wife much. Or a husband. Modern life really isn’t meant for living alone. There’s always too much work for one person.”

His gaze went soft and hazy behind his glasses, and he sighed. “That is true.”

The moment was… not tense, exactly, but it felt as if something had shifted between them with those words, with the yearning his response had revealed. A little too intense for the bantering flirtation they’d been keeping up so far. Rosemary cast about, trying to cudgel her tired and increasingly tipsy brain into providing a new topic of conversation.

She glanced up. “Hey, look, mistletoe.”

Alexander glanced up as well, and smiled. “You know what that means, do you not?” he asked, his face making it clear that he was back to teasing her and not at all serious.

Rosemary raised a challenging eyebrow at him. “I think it means you should come over here and kiss me.” Oh, lord, she was more tipsy than she’d thought, if she was propositioning him. But she wasn’t going to let herself regret it.

His eyes widened. “Ah. That is…”

Maybe he had a partner, or wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to make assumptions.”

He blushed, and his eyes shut, as if he could not bear to look at her. “It is not… I mean, I would like to, I think,” he said in a squeaky little voice.

“You think?” Rosemary asked, amused

He opened his eyes and studied her, a little frown puckering the skin between his eyebrows. “It is just that I have been thinking so fervently about kissing you every time you nibble on your lower lip that I do not quite trust this to not be a dream,” he admitted. “Have I put my head down on this table and fallen asleep in the last five minutes?”

“Afraid not,” Rosemary said softly. “That was an offer made in earnest.” She leaned in close to him, and closer still, and then he met her halfway, his breath soft against her lips as they both hesitated for a moment

It was a gentle sort of kiss, the sort that was more exploration than anything else, the sort of kiss only shared by two people who were trying to figure out for the first time how they fit together. Alexander tasted like the vodka he’d been drinking, and she wanted to drink him down. But she hesitated, uncertain as to whether he was enjoying this as well.

When she broke the kiss, he was breathing harder than he had been, and his eyes looked dazed. But when she glanced down at his mouth and back up, making what she wanted clear from her expression, his lips were on hers again in an instant. And this kiss was no gentle, exploratory thing. This kiss was the kiss of a man who wanted… well, more than kissing, that much was certain.

This time he was the one to break the kiss. He sat back with a sigh, dropping his head against the back of the booth and staring up at the mistletoe. “What are we doing?”

“I don’t know.” She slumped back against the cushions behind her and let out a sigh of her own. “Well, all right, we seem to be doing the sort of thing that only seems to be a good idea when you’re an exhausted, tipsy person hanging out with a stranger when you’d otherwise be spending the night alone in an airport hotel. Which is to say, something extremely foolish.”

He laughed a little bit at that, and lifted her hand off the table, guiding it to his mouth and pressing a kiss to the back of it. “I suppose that must be it.” He sounded almost sad as he said the words. And then he looked at her, intense and very serious for a moment. “How foolish do you wish to be this evening?”

Rosemary’s mouth went dry. She downed the rest of her whiskey in one fiery swallow before answering his question with another. “What did you have in mind?”

“Get a hotel room with me.” Alexander’s cheeks flushed dark as he said the words, but he kept his gaze locked on hers, waiting for her reaction.

And hell, it was a bad, _bad_ idea to get a room with a man she’d only just met. But he was a skinny little stick of a man, so they’d probably be pretty evenly matched if he tried anything, and if she didn’t spend the entire night... “Separate rooms, but I’ll come to yours with condoms.”

He nodded immediate agreement and downed the rest of his drink. “Shall we go check in?”

She nodded back, and, without another word, they left the little booth and its dangerous mistletoe behind and headed back towards the reception area of the hotel.

If there had been much of a line, it had disappeared by the time they got there. Right now, there was just one person between them and the front desk clerk, a middle-aged man who seemed to be in a particularly foul mood, with a woman his age and two teenagers in tow.

“My family has three vouchers,” that man was saying as they approached, almost snarling at the clerk. “I want three rooms.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but space is at a premium. We’re asking families to—“

“I. Don’t. Care.” The man slammed his fist down on the counter and the front desk clerk jumped. “Our flights were canceled. I want what I’m entitled to.”

The clerk’s mouth thinned disapprovingly, but he turned to his computer. “I will see what I can do. They may be on different floors.”

Rosemary exchanged a look at Alexander and raised one eyebrow. “I was wondering—“

“Yes,” he said, handing his voucher to her, clearly reading her mind. When the exhausted-looking clerk finished with the man and had checked him and his family in, Rosemary stepped up and handed both vouchers over.

“My friend and I will share a room,” she said, shooting a superior look at the man who had been making such a fuss, though he clearly did not have the self-awareness to be embarrassed by the spectacle he had been making of himself. His family did, though, and the older woman Rosemary took to be his wife glanced apologetically her way in return.

The clerk looked down at his screen with a frown. “Would you be all right with just one bed? Only we’re expecting a few more families…”

Rosemary exchanged a swift, sideways look with Alexander. He nodded firmly. “Yes, that should be just fine, thank you.”

The clerk visibly relaxed. “All right. Let me just get you two checked in… Could I have a credit card to put on file in case you want to charge anything to the room?” Rosemary handed hers over before Alexander could move to offer his. A minute later and the clerk was handing her a pair of keycards. “There’s a continental breakfast starting at seven, and check-out time is eleven. Anything else I can get you two?”

Rosemary bit her lower lip nervously, knowing the clerk would most likely judge her for what she was about to ask for. “Anywhere around here a girl could get her hands on some condoms?”

To the clerk’s credit, his expression did not change at all. “I’ll have housekeeping bring some up.”

Rosemary beamed at the man and set a five dollar tip on the counter. “Thank you very much.”

When she turned to Alexander, his face—all the way to the _ears_ , poor man—had turned bright red. But he took the key card she offered him without comment, and, when she turned and made her way towards the elevators, he followed.

They were quiet during the elevator ride up to the floor their room was on, the awareness of what they planned to do once they got there strung tight between them, a tension made of attraction and lust and just a little bit of fear. Alexander had never spent a night with a stranger before, not for _this_ , not for the sex they were both obviously planning to have, and he was wary of both Rosemary and his own reaction to her.

From the searching, side-long look she gave him before she unlocked the door to the room they would be sharing for the night, he thought she probably had as many doubts as he did. But if she had doubts, she did not voice them, so neither did he.

“Which side?” she asked him.

“Either will do,” he responded. Without another word, she wheeled her carry-on to the far side of the bed and tucked it up against the wall there. He followed suit with the side closest to the door.

She came back around to what was now his side of the bed and leaned against it. “We should talk about—“

“I am clean,” he interrupted, sitting at her side. “You?”

She nodded.

Alexander took her by the hand, tugging her close, almost into his lap, desperate to see if that second kiss in the bar had been a fluke or if kissing her really was as delightful as he had thought. She tilted her head and kissed him back, hot and passionate and clearly enjoying herself.

“We should wait for the condoms,” she said breathlessly, breaking away just far enough to speak.

“Want to work my way up to that,” Alexander said, nuzzling gently against the tip of her nose.

“Oh.” Her eyes widened. “We don’t have to… to get to the point where the condoms will be necessary, if you’re not comfortable with that.”

“I _want_ to have sex with you,” he growled, feeling the need to make his intentions clear. “But I want it to be good. Want to make sure you are ready. That we both are.”

“I’m ready for you now,” she murmured, taking his lower lip between her teeth and nibbling lightly on it, a move that would have had his knees collapsing beneath him if he had still been standing. “And we should wait for the condoms.”

Alexander took a deep, shuddering breath and straightened up. “Right. Yes.” But she didn’t make any attempt to move away from him, so he bent over her again and nuzzled against her ear.

Rosemary laughed and rubbed her cheek against his. “Stubble,” she murmured, almost incoherent.

“You like it?” He brushed his cheek against hers.

“Mm. Want to know what it feels like between my thighs.”

So far, Alexander had only been half-aroused, his cock sitting uncomfortably in his boxers but still mostly soft. But that had him at full mast in an instant.

All right. Good to know. He had not had sex with enough women to really know what bits he enjoyed best, but the thought of going down on one, or at least this one in particular? Apparently, astoundingly high on his list of things that were arousing despite his almost complete lack of experience in that arena.

There was a knock on their door. “Housekeeping.”

Rosemary extracted herself from his arms and went after her shoulder bag—which she had set on her side of the bed—pulling out a bill. “Just a minute!” she called towards the door.

The elderly woman at the door took the tip Rosemary offered her and handed over a small packet in exchange, completely stone-faced. Rosemary, on the other hand, burst into nervous giggles once the door was closed. “God,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m so used to having my own on hand that it never occurred to me that I might find it mortifying to get them from hotel housekeeping. Buying them never gives me this sort of trouble.”

“You could have let me go to door,” Alexander said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Would you have been less embarrassed?”

He considered, and immediately blushed. “Probably not. There is a difference between the convenience store clerk knowing that you will be having sex at some future date, and the people who run the hotel knowing, well…”

“That we’ll be having sex here, tonight, in this bed.” Rosemary let out a breathless little laugh. “Yeah. Doesn’t really help my performance anxiety at all, got to say.”

“I thought that only men worried about that sort of thing.”

She smiled, finally coming back to his side and sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Just because it’s more obvious when a dick doesn’t get hard doesn’t mean that women don’t have things they worry about too. ‘Will I get wet enough?’ ‘Oh, god, am I going to make that horrible grunting noise when I come? What if that turns my partner off? What if I come but can’t get them to?’ That sort of thing.”

“ _Do_ you make horrible grunting noise when you come?”

She shuddered theatrically and shut her eyes. “I think I’d rather not answer that question. It’s awfully embarrassing, and anyway—” she reached for him, sliding her arm around his waist and her body closer to his “—you’ll get a chance to find out yourself, if you’re good.”

Alexander raised an eyebrow. “And if I am not good?”

“I make fake orgasm sounds and go get off in the shower.”

He tried not to laugh at that, but it burst out of him anyway. “I will do my best,” he managed to get out, still chuckling. He took his glasses off and wiped tears of laughter—and exhaustion too, probably—on his sleeve.

As he did, Rosemary leaned into his side, warm and comforting against him. “We could just sleep, you know. I know _I’m_ getting to the point where I’m a bit silly.”

He rubbed his cheek against the top of her head. “Only if you are too tired. But I would like to spend more time with you, if you are up to it. Whether we have sex or just sit and talk.”

“I think I want to kiss you again and see where things go from there,” she murmured, before pressing her lips to his neck. “Sound good?”

“Perfect,” he murmured back. He leaned towards the bedside table and deposited his glasses there, followed by the packet of condoms when Rosemary handed it over. And then he turned back to her, taking her face in both hands, just looking at her for a moment, and then a moment longer.

Blyad, she was gorgeous.

“Are you going to kiss me or what?” she asked, her voice trembling a little, her eyes darting up to meet his briefly and then away, as if she couldn’t bear the full force of his gaze on her face, as if his admiration was too much for her. Alexander smiled and leaned in to nibble on that full lower lip of hers. She let out a low moan and reached for him, grabbing him by the back of the neck and tugging him into a full-mouthed kiss, that firm grasp making his knees go even more wobbly than they already were.

Alexander’s button-up was the first casualty as they began to undress one another, followed swiftly by Rosemary’s sweater. On her orders, he admired the marvelous job her bra was doing of supporting her breasts, but only for as long as it took him to figure out how the clasp worked.

Her moan when he bent over her to tease her nipple with his tongue went straight to his cock. He was rock-hard and probably dripping by now, and he desperately wanted between her thighs, one way or the other. “Take these off,” he said, tugging at the waistband of her leggings. “Want you to feel my stubble.”

While she kicked her boots off and wiggled her way out of the leggings, Alexander hastily shed the rest of his clothing. Rosemary scrambled up on the bed behind him and threw herself back against the pillows with a laugh. “God, it feels good to lay down.”

“Bet I can make you feel better.” Of course, he was talking complete nonsense and he knew it, but she didn’t… and there had to be some overlap between giving good head to a man and giving good head to a woman, right?

She let out another laugh, this one a throaty chuckle that sent a shiver down his spine. And then, very deliberately, she spread her thighs, and all Alexander could do was stare. “Well, darling, get to work,” she purred at him.

He lowered himself to his hands and knees between her legs, getting a closer look at the lay of the land. The nubbin of her clit looked hard and swollen, peeking out from beneath its hood. And he could not resist. At the first tentative touch of his tongue against her clit, she shivered; when he curled his tongue up beneath it and lapped her up like a cat who had gotten into the cream, she moaned.

And when he figured out how to get purchase with his lips, wrapped them around her, and sucked, she screamed.

It was a choked, breathless sort of scream, one he savored the sound of as her thighs clenched hard against his cheeks, as her hips moved, grinding her against him. And then, with a low grunt that he found completely delightful, she came. Or at least he assumed that was what had happened. If not, well, the slickness against his chin and beneath his tongue made him think she was ready for him, at least, and he was currently so aroused he could think of little else but kissing his way up her body and sheathing himself between her legs.

So he did, and she met him with an open-mouthed kiss and as much enthusiasm as he was feeling for her, moaning as his first thrust sent him all the way into her with hardly any resistance at all. His second thrust felt even better, her cunt hot and slick and clenching hard around him... and then he swore and withdrew, going for the bedside table.

“What’s wrong?”

“Forgot condom,” he grunted, snatching up the package and then sitting back on his heels to fumble it open.

“If it’s any consolation, so did I,” she said with a breathless laugh.

“Mm,” was all he could manage, what little brain power he had left at the moment devoted to opening the condom and rolling it on. And then he was back over Rosemary, letting out a low moan as he entered her again. Perhaps there was a little less sensation this way, but he could not bring himself to mind it. He would last longer this way. And Rosemary seemed to appreciate it, making desperate little noises in the back of her throat and clinging to him as he fucked her, in long slow strokes at first and then faster, harder, his hips moving compulsively in short little jerks as he sought an orgasm of his own.

She held him to her as he gasped and shuddered his way through his climax, her lips warm against the pulse in his neck, making no protest as he collapsed against her.

“That was...” he managed to murmur after a few long, breathless moments in which he simply savored her presence.

“Mm,” she agreed, pressing an affectionate kiss to his cheek. Alexander felt that casual affection straight to the core of him. Here he was, with a woman he barely knew, in a situation that the more sensible part of his brain would normally be eager to escape.

But instead, he found himself hating the certainty that this night would end.

The next morning, Rosemary was sore and exhausted and could not bring herself to regret it in the slightest. They’d fucked their way through the rest of the condoms, caught up in the sudden heat of lust that their obviously mutual attraction had inflicted on them both, paying no attention at all to the fact that they’d both been too tired for this sort of thing before they’d even started. Not that that had stopped them at all.

They had been so distracted that Alexander had forgotten to find his charging cord and plug in his phone the night before, but fortunately Rosemary had had the foresight to set the alarm clock on the bedside table for them both. They’d compared departure times the night before, during one of the lulls, and, upon discovering that they were on the same flight into LA today, had made tentative plans to eat lunch together in the terminal before Alexander needed to transfer over to the international terminal and catch his flight to Moscow.

The flight to LA was torture. She could see the back of his head, three rows in front of her, and wished he were close enough that they could have an actual conversation. But she supposed it was for the best; she’d never been tempted to try and join the Mile High Club, but if he was in the seat next to her she would find herself sorely tempted to drag him off to one of the bathrooms on the plane and see about becoming a member of it.

Lunch was the opposite of torture. They ate overpriced fast food, neither of them willing to pay the even-more-inflated prices that the fine dining establishments in the terminal offered, laughing and gesturing their way through a conversation that was about nothing and everything, the very air between them seeming to sing with their synchronicity. She knew it was just the temporary nature of this encounter that made everything so easy between them, but even still, it made her think. As busy as she was, as little time as she had for a relationship, as much as she didn’t care one way or another if she was, she still found herself wondering if she could make it work with this man.

She kept shoving those thoughts down, knowing they were foolish, but as they walked together towards where he would transfer to the international terminal, they kept popping up, until finally it was time to say goodbye and she found she couldn’t resist.

“I was wondering…” but she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence, either. Whatever last night had been, she didn’t think it was a magic they could ever recapture, and she worried that if they tried… well, she was a workaholic, and he’d said enough to make her think he was the same way. Even if it did turn out that they lived in the same part of the country—something that wasn’t a guarantee—when would they find time for something more?

Alexander seemed to understand her unasked question. He smiled ruefully at her. “I know. Last night was…”

“A fantasy.”

His jaw tensed for a moment. He released it on a sigh. “Yes.”

“And now we’re in the real world again.” Rosemary took a deep breath, echoed Alexander’s sigh. “I just wish I weren’t such a pragmatist.”

“It was fun, though,” he said.

“It was, wasn’t it?” She took his hand in hers and squeezed it tight. “You ever find yourself stranded in an airport at the same time as me again, and we can do a repeat performance.”

“That… that sounds nice.” He bent over her, pressed a gentle and all-too-tender kiss to her cheek, one that made her heart break a little. “I should go now. Will take time to get through security for international flight.”

“All right.” Rosemary brushed a kiss to his cheek before he withdrew. “Travel safe, you hear?”

He nodded, and then bent over her again, and this time was no milquetoast kiss to the cheek. Rosemary was left flustered and breathless by the time he decided he’d had enough and pulled back, and from the satisfied look on his face, she thought he knew what he’d done to her. “You travel safely as well,” he said.

And then he turned and stepped on to the escalator that lead to the international terminal, leaving her behind. It was only once he was out of sight that she realized she didn’t even know his last name.

Probably for the best, she reasoned.

Because she wasn’t certain she would be able to resist trying to hunt him down again if she had it.

And that was something that could only end poorly.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is going to have three potential and non-overlapping sequels. 
> 
> Complete:
> 
> [Call and Answer](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28988859), 3374 words, rated M. Six months ago, Alexander Hilbert had a one night stand with a woman he was trapped in an airport with, and has been regretting their decision not to exchange contact information with her ever since. Fate must be on his side, though, because he just ran into her again, and this time he's not walking away without a number. Includes: they'd met once before while he was still a grad student, older woman/younger man, awkward flirting, open but happy for now ending.
> 
> In progress and of unknown length because they've got enough words written so far to need chapters:
> 
> [But They Were Coworkers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29727726/chapters/73114869), rated M. Alexander never expected to see the woman he spent an unforgettable night in an airport hotel with again after they parted ways without exchanging contact information. But when his lab manager gets fired and he gets transferred to a lab at the his company's other location, he discovers that he is going to see her again. Daily. In the lab they now share. Oh, and by the way, has he mentioned that this is the coworker who hates him? Includes: Enemies to Lovers, Annoying Coworker, Second Chances, and probably eventually some making out in supply closets at work.
> 
> [Unplanned and Unprepared](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29382054/chapters/72179148), rated E. Two and a half months ago, Rosemary Epps had a one-night stand with a man she'd never met while they were both stuck in the airport due to snow. Now, she's realized that there were consequences... and the fact that she keeps thinking about keeping this unexpected pregnancy means she should probably try to hunt down the father. If only she'd remembered to get more than his first name... Includes: Unplanned Pregnancy, Strangers to Lovers, Second Chances, Phone Sex, Actual Sex because chances of these two keeping their hands off one another are slim, and will eventually include them exchanging books in their favorite trashy literature genres as a way to get to know one another. Also a baby. Eventually.


End file.
